Ernest Hemingway Quotes
-
This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.
-
Wars are caused by undefended wealth.
-
Fish," he said, "I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you dead before this day ends.
-
The worst death for anyone is to lose the center of his being, the thing he really is. Retirement is the filthiest word in the language. Whether by choice or by fate, to retire from what you do - and makes you what you are - is to back up into the grave.
-
Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function.
-
My writing is nothing, my boxing is everything.
-
A cat has absolute honesty.
-
In war, one cannot say what one feels.
-
A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.
-
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.
-
You never kill any one that you want to kill in a war, he said to himself.
-
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
-
I try not to borrow, first you borrow then you beg.
-
It wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.
-
You're going to write straight and simple and good now. That's the start.''What if I'm not straight and simple and good? Do you think I can write that way?''Write how you are but make it straight.
-
You never understand anybody that loves you.
-
To be able to say: I loved this person, we had a hell of a nice time together, it's over but in a way it will never be over and I do know that I for sure loved this person, to be able to say that and mean it, that's rare. That's rare and valuable.
-
He did not say that because he knew that if you said a good thing it might not happen.
-
I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day.
-
There isnt always an explanation for everything.
-
My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I wrote nor while I was writing.
-
The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.
-
When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it.
-
Let him think is I am more man than I am and I will be so.